Martin LeFevre - Experiencing Timeless Being

Overhanging the gorge are great angular outcroppings of volcanic
rock—solid and sharp-edged protrusions from some long-ago eruption of
Lassen or some other volcano in the area.

In many
places, the sheer sides of the gorge have huge slabs balanced on top of
them--some looking like a giant stonemason had placed them there. Other
large formations, with deep fissures where they meet the canyon wall,
sit vertically in precarious positions, awaiting the next major
earthquake to send them tumbling into the stream below.

Beyond
the gorge, gently sloping grasslands ascend to the base of the sheer
cliffs that form the perimeter of the canyon. Perched near the precipice
under one of the plentiful oaks in the area, I can hear the rushing of
the stream at the bottom of the glistening gorge, which stretches for
hundreds of meters down and away.

The grasses around me are so
dry that they break at the touch, and appear golden from even a meter
away. Directly across, beyond the narrow gorge within the relative
sanctuary of the large, fan-shaped canyon, are the majestic cliffs,
rising hundreds of meters into a cloud-scudded sky.

Big buzzards,
masters of the air in their own right, appear as lumbering leviathans
next to smaller, more agile woodland hawks that follow in their wake,
screeching as they wheel and dive into the trees at the foot of the
cliffs.

Psychological time ends, and the mind, anchored in the
present, ranges briefly over the past. The people who once lived in this
beautiful place come to mind, and to heart. Is something of their
essence still here?

Native Americans loved this canyon, and
revered it as sacred. They were wiped out, driven off, and assimilated
into a dominant culture that thought of the land only in terms of
profit. But listening deeply in the meditative state, one seems to hear
whispers across the land of their lives. Is it imagination, or
actuality?

The undirected mind in meditation is like a laser
effortlessly boring through the strata accumulated in
content-consciousness—not only from one’s own life, but also from the
lives of all previous generations. Through such openings the light of
the cosmos pours into one, and one participates, however briefly, in the
infinite intelligence beyond thought.

Even for adept meditators,
indeed perhaps even for ‘enlightened’ people, the meditative state is
not a constant, but a quality of consciousness that one has to ignite
each day by making space for undivided attention. Nature is crucial to
the process, though a mindful, silent walk through a park in the middle
of a city, followed by a half hour’s sitting in one’s residence with the
light flooding in as the bustle goes on below, can be sufficient to
generate a radical shift in consciousness.

Spiritual knowledge is
the easiest thing to fake, but meditative states are much harder to
feign. The world is full of followers, and only a few stand alone. Any
clever man or woman can put on wisdom robes and pass himself or herself
off as an enlightened guru. There’s an entire industry of such
charlatans now, willing to sell you their books, DVD’s, retreats, or
whatever.

The supposedly enlightened ones mislead people, telling
them how they can get from here to there, from this consciousness to
the next. Becoming sells, especially with regard to enlightenment,
because time is all we know, in one form or another.

But one
does not ‘attain’ illumination; one enters that dimension through the
back door, quietly and anonymously. There’s nothing to reach as an end;
there’s only growth through negation, though that sounds like a
contradiction in terms.

Our consciousness is based on time. Not
chronological time, but psychological time--becoming this or becoming
that. We’re nearly always looking forward to something, or back at our
memories.

To some degree looking forward to things is healthy,
but when time-based consciousness is all one knows, one is a slave to
becoming and memory. That mode prevents one from growing as a human
being.

Time is obviously necessary for carrying out tasks, but
are time and evolution involved in radical change and revolution in
consciousness?Astronomers continually tell us that when we look
out at a distant star or galaxy, we’re seeing it as it was many light
years ago, since it took the light from the object a hundred or a
thousand or a million light years to reach us. But if you think about
it, that is nonsensical. It simply means that every instant of the past
is enfolded in the present.

Psychological time is antithetical
to transmutation and revolution. Spiritual growth only occurs when time
as the past, projected into the future, ends.

It’s therefore a
confusion of the highest order to talk about ‘conscious evolution.’ When
we are really changing, we aren’t conscious of it until later, and then
only fleetingly, like looking in a rear view mirror while driving down
the highway.

Though I haven’t completely mastered time within
myself, I’ve experienced how timeless consciousness can function in the
field of time, but time-based consciousness has no relationship to the
timeless.

But if this shift happens spontaneously, does one even
know when psychological time stops? Yes, because the mind no longer
looks forward or back; it just effortlessly remains with what is.

However
long that lasts by the clock, one is forever changed in experiencing
timeless being. My question is: why does time-bound consciousness
return?